Religion Dispatches
…ement on the group’s Italian-language website declared, “Anonymous decided today to besiege your site in response to the doctrine, to the liturgies, to the absurd and anachronistic concepts that your for-profit organization spreads around the world.” The statement alluded to the burning of heretics, the repression of Galileo, the genocide of Native Americans, aiding Nazi fugitives, and the more recent sexual abuse scandal. Anonymous members attemp…
Read More…gelical,” and in the 1990s, this was certainly not unusual, and isn’t even today. I’m not excusing it, I’m just saying this seems sort of inevitable if Obama is going to pick a conservative evangelical. The question is why he does. Whether this will cause the same uproar that Obama’s selection of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his first inauguration remains to be seen, but already one can sense some the outcry brewing. But unlike with Wa…
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…from them. Hence the need for a book like Jones’: the truth can’t set you free until you know what the truth is, and the truth is that white American Christians suck at racial equality. It’s a decent hypothesis and response, but simply knowing better rarely solves issues as complex as white supremacy. Social problems are, well, social, and require us to take into account broader patterns and movements. In this instance, it’s worth looking at anot…
Read More…igins of Totalitarianism, which he called “prophetic in its application to today.” Indeed the Manhattan Declaration itself, dressed up as a celebration of “life,” hauls out the trope that abortion is like genocide or holocaust, and claims that LGBT rights infringe on (real) Christians’ religious freedom. In his video released in conjunction with the Manhattan Declaration, Colson called the Declaration “crucially important for religious liberty,” a…
Read More…line “who advocated stoning of homosexuals,” in this case the Christianity Today article allows Roberta Ahmanson to paint Rushdoony as an man who spent his life struggling with his family history and whose ideas aren’t really all “that bad” but are misunderstood in contemporary culture: Roberta claims he wasn’t “the ogre” he was made out to be and explains his theodicy as a response to his family’s flight from the Armenian genocide in Turkey. His…
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…n this issue.” I don’t think that should be as hard as it is. Christianity Today criticized your book, saying: Crafting highly personalized views of God may soothe our church-inflicted wounds, but responding to fracture within the church with personalized gods hardly seems the path toward unity. I wish he had found more hope in the examples of Christians learning, engaging in difficult conversation, and building relationships across perceived chas…
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…eadline called him an “Apostle of Bible-Based Economics,” and Christianity Today declared that North “Saw Austrian Economics in the Bible and Disaster on the Horizon.” All true. But both obits made little assessment of the political and theological significance of his life and prodigious work as an author, editor, publisher and back room political strategist. Let’s see if we can help. The 1976 election featuring professing evangelical Christian Ji…
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…elical Protestant) reaction to Biden’s action, as reported in Christianity Today and elsewhere, where scholars and cranks play whack-a-mole with Bible verses having to do with debt. What I like best is the Can we proof-text this? We probably shouldn’t. But let’s try anyway! aspect of it. Not to mention the dominant focus on rival passages in the Hebrew Bible without much, if any, attention paid to how Jesus responded to debt peonage in his time an…
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…he state is responsible.” A few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today, questioned the ruling, although the magazine published an editorial three years later entitled “Is Abortion a Catholic Issue?” That editorial affirmed the general principle of right to life but concluded: “There are, of course, other considerations, such as the rights of the parents and the much-debated question of when life begins.” The overwhelming response to Roe…
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…hurch and community organizing in which we live. Progressive Christianity today, by whatever name, is characterized by an ethos of egalitarian civility that makes it allergic to developing strong leaders. It works in a coalitional style and speaks in the voice of an improvisational ensemble, or as James Wind says, an always-evolving chorus. We don’t want anyone to presume to lead us or speak for us, and we tend to be reticent about our faith. On…
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